What is Jewish music? Like Jewish identity, that question can ultimately only remain open. What we can say with certainty is that, except in Israel today, throughout history, Jews have always and everywhere been a minority in the communities where they lived. Preserving their uniqueness through language, religion and customs, Jewish cultures could not be separated from the world in which they developed. For example, Kletzmer is a mixture of Eastern European folklore and Gypsy music. Arnold Schoenberg as an integrated cosmopolitan Jew (like Mendelssohn and Mahler before him) experienced the tragedies and aesthetic turmoil of his era at the very end of the Austro-Hungarian empire. Like Schoenberg and Bloch and many other Jewish émigrés in America, Korngold writes film scores and leaves his mark on Hollywood. His influence is felt to this day and one of the best examples is the music of John Williams.

Among the millions of murdered Jews in concentration camps, there are of course also great composers.  Beyond the limits of their genius, the works written in those conditions belong to the historical moment when Viktor Ullmann, Ilse Weber, Gideon Klein, Robert Dauber, thanks to music, found above all their humanity, which their tormentors took away from them.

One work in this program was written by a goy (a word from the Bible for all non-Jews) and is proof that influences can be two-way. For the duo Porque Llorax, Philippe Ersan, one of the most popular contemporary French composers, found inspiration in an old Sephardic song in which harmonic patterns from oriental music can be recognized.

The last two compositions belong to today's time and are the works of composers related to Israel, but who at the same time have a very critical attitude towards the current events in that area.  Osvaldo Goliov's very important Argentinian-Israeli composer in his work Tenebrae (2003) juxtaposes the brutality of war and the hope of youth, parts of peaceful texture and those of subterranean tension that describe the pain and suffering of wars in the Middle East. We end with a piece by Michael Cohen Weissert, an Israeli composer and pianist living in Berlin. Using motifs from Mahler's music, with the influence of jazz and Kletzmer, this composition is the image and of this festival program - a program open to the world